The teams chosen campsite was located a little ways away from the Pit of Despair. There was a small alcove that someone had carved out of the tunnel wall that had things like a fire pit and even ledges dug into the wall for people to put their tents in. On the way over Kyle desperately tried to think of what he was going to say once Sarah started her questioning. It’s not that he left stuff out when he told people about his time in the secret training area before, exactly, he was just… more selective about it.

Okay, Kyle, there has to be a way to do this. No one actually knows what is was like, so you hold all the cards here, right? The problem is that I don’t actually know what’s normal out here. Is it normal to purposefully get eaten by a beast to kill it from the inside? Maybe I should keep that part to myself…

From everything he had heard and experienced, Kyle was beginning to suspect that while the hunting in the regular part of the dungeon had become standardized, that standardization, which seemed to be overly focused on safety, had lulled Humanity into a false sense of security. That feeling was only reinforced when the group reached their campsite.

Kyle watched, nonplussed, as everyone moved about setting up camp, each person executing their assigned task with precision. While he found their speed and accuracy impressive, there was a major problem with their campsite. Namely, that it did almost nothing to protect them.

There was always a need to set up a secure camp in the secret training area, and that was true even before Kyle had found the alarm crystal artifact. Part of the reason he had traded it away was he didn’t really need it. He had plenty of experience setting up a secure camp without it.

“Hey Sarah, do you mind if I add some stuff to the camp?” Kyle said. While the surroundings seemed safe, Kyle had learned you could never be too cautious.

Sarah shot him a slightly questioning look.

“Sure? What do you want to add though? We already set up the cooking area and established the perimeter.”

Kyle nearly snorted. Their ‘perimeter’ was a long rope that was strung around the campsite. Whenever a monster crossed over the rope it would scream an alarm. While he conceded this may, may, work for normal monsters, Kyle could think of quite a few scenarios where their measly ‘perimeter’ was far from sufficient.

Instead of answering Sarah’s questions Kyle set to work creating an actual perimeter. Their first mistake was they created a clearly demarcated perimeter line, as this could tip off any slightly intelligent monsters there was something there, but he would let it slide for now.

The first thing Kyle did was to take some mana crystals out from his pocket dimension for enchanting. Were he planning to make a more permanent campsite he would use a different material, but for only three days mana crystals should suffice. They made fantastic enchantment holders except for the fact that they only lasted for five days tops. Setting up the wards for a campsite was so routine that Kyle almost forgot about his fancy new artifact. That was easily fixed though, and soon he had the Gauntlet of Creation equipped and was ready to go.

It seemed Sarah was not the only one interested in what he was doing, as Simon, Walt, and Li joined her in followed Kyle around as he ‘fixed’ (created) the perimeter. The process was completed fairly quickly, and from outside it only looked like Kyle walked around the outside of the campsite, crushing mana crystals all along the way. Well, the mana crystals weren’t being crushed so much as they were disintegrating. The dust they created was then suspended briefly in the air before becoming invisible.

Protection, Alarm, illusion, dispersal, and intention. That should be fine for now. It’s probably overkill to put phasing and teleportation in, but I guess I should just to be safe. And a sanctuary to finish it off. The gauntlet really makes this a lot easier. Oh, and I guess I shouldn’t forget to key it to everyone else as well. Wouldn’t want them wandering outside and then not being able to get back in.

Once he was finished Kyle stepped back to study his handiwork. Now he felt like he could actually relax a bit. Before there was the constant tension between the idea of being in a campsite and the fact that it wasn’t actually safe. No matter what mental skills he had Kyle still didn’t appreciate cognitive dissonance.

“So what did you do?” Sarah asked. Her tone conveyed her lack of appreciation for Kyle’s work.

“I added some wards to the campsite. You can never be too safe in the dungeon.”

Sarah didn’t look convinced.

“You mentioned something about that before. It sounded like there might be some things you haven’t told us.”

Kyle really hoped he wasn’t actually sweating under Sarah’s gaze. It sure felt like it though.

“Uh, yeah, about that. Let’s go sit down and, uh, I can tell you what I mean.”

Okay, keep it cool. Cool and calm. Sarah doesn’t actually know what you held back. Yep, she doesn’t know. I just need to follow the plan and only tell her some other things I didn’t mention before. No need to worry her. It would be useless worry anyway.

Whether by unspoken or spoken agreement it seemed like the news about Kyle’s story time had spread around and the whole group ended up congregating around Kyle by the firecrystal near the center of the campsite. That, or they wanted to inspect the mysterious stone couches and chairs that Kyle created in the hopes of softening the mood for his big reveal.

Kyle waited until everyone was seated to start. Then he had to wait for them to get settled in the stone furniture, which, thanks to his enchanting skills and his new artifact, felt more like real furniture than stone constructs. Everyone eventually was settled in though, and Kyle took a long, deep breath before starting his story.

“Okay, so while the dungeon out here seems rather safe, the secret training area was anything but. It wasn’t the monsters themselves that were super dangerous, as the danger came from the dungeon’s traps and surprises. The first and most memorable time this happened was on floor six…”

Once Kyle had finished the fifth floor of the secret training area he thought he had it figured out. The fifth floor had been hell, taking him longer than the first four floors combined, but he had completed it. In comparison, the sixth floor could be considered a cake walk. The only thing the sixth floor seemed to need was time and the right amount of caution.

The sixth floor was one giant field, one filled to the brim with nature’s bounty. That bounty even included animals. Nice, furry, cute, bloodsucking animals. When he had first arrived, Kyle had assumed the incredibly cute and fluffy looking bunnies were enemies, as there wasn’t anything else that looked like it could be a monster anywhere in sight. But thinking they were enemies and seeing their eyes turn red and their claws grow three feet as they sacrificed their live to try and maul him were two very different things.

But once Kyle figured out their fighting style they weren’t really dangerous. If he stayed the correct distance away he could even spike them before they got into melee range. The only problem was their numbers. Kyle suspected it wasn’t quite in the five digits, but it was close. And while he could deal with one easily, and two fairly safely, aggroing anything above that would spell trouble.

The real kicker came two weeks into the sixth floor. Kyle had been steadily clearing away the bunnies and estimated that is would take another week or so to clear them all out before he could make his way to the center area, where he presumed the boss would be. That was when he realized that while the bunnies were bloodthirsty monsters, they were still rabbits. And they still did what rabbits do best: fuck.

While Kyle had been clearing the monsters out, they had been steadily repopulating behind him. Kyle had estimated it would take about a month tops to clear out the bunnies. It took two. At the end of that two months though, the rabbits were cleared out and Kyle was ready to face the boss, a giant chinchilla that Kyle suspected has some sort of charm ability based on how fluffy it looked.

At this point Kyle paused in his story, thinking over how best to tell this next part.

“So what happened next?” Sarah said, her impatience showing. “So far it sounds pretty tame. Is there something you aren’t telling us?”

“Did you at least get some bunny fur?” Li chimed in. “I would love to kill some fluffy bunnies. Imagine the pillow you could make from them!”

“Just a minute, guys,” Kyle said. “I’m thinking.” This was the meat of the story, and he wanted to get it right. He just needed some thought on how exactly to describe what happened.

“Okay, so by this point all the bunnies were dead and I was ready to move onto the boss. I had scoped it out and…”

Kyle had learned from the previous floor and took his time preparing for the boss fight. He even made some hidey holes in case it had some large, unavoidable AOE attacks. His preparation took three days, and on the fourth day, it was time to fight.

Unless given a reason to do otherwise, Kyle always started off his fights from range. He was a mage after all, and mages did their best work when they were bombarding their opponents from far away. The battle started off smoothly, with Kyle firing skills at it while kiting in a circle. At the time, Kyle thought he was lucky. The chinchilla seemed similar to the rabbits in its behavior, and a few minutes passed by uneventfully with Kyle successfully kiting the boss monsters around, never letting it near him.

That was when the trouble started. The chinchilla, like a lot of other monsters, had a rage bar. This was nothing new. Once the monsters health reached a certain point or it got enraged enough it would enter another stage. Most monsters typically got stronger or faster, or maybe gained more defense. The chinchilla though, summoned a volcano. Literally.

One moment Kyle was kiting the boss around in a circle. The next, it stops, roars (it was more of a cute cry of anger befitting chinchilla), and then a volcano literally erupted from the center of the once peaceful meadow.

Kyle had no doubt that had he not been cautious enough to constantly have a shield up he would have died. The lava would have been much more damaging had it been affecting him directly as opposed to the shield blocking it. The main thing was at that point he had no healing skills, and getting the lava off would have been nigh impossible. He would have become a brimstone statue, slowing being cooked to death in molten stone.

Kyle then had the pleasure to experience an extreme surge of adrenaline brought on by fear. For over half an hour. That was how long it took for him to wear the chinchilla down since it seemed just fine swimming in the lava. Kyle was not though, and had he not been able to sculpt it with his Basic Earth Shaping that would have been that, game over. But, somehow, he persevered through the intense heat and managed to keep a somewhat stable frame of mind to finish off the boss.

“…and that’s when I decided I needed to focus my skills on survivability. It was my first real taste of what the dungeon had to offer. Monsters are dangerous, but traps and environmental hazards are more so. It doesn’t matter how high your health is or how much damage your skills can deal if you are stranded in a wasteland of poison gas, pits of acid, and random geysers of flame.”

The six people before him sat in silence, mulling over Kyle’s story. From their various expressions Kyle guessed they had never heard of anything like it before. Kyle had never really thought about it, but perhaps his experience wasn’t typical. It would seem a stable farming environment was more common.

Could the dungeon as a whole really be that safe? I guess I didn’t really run into anything on my way to the city, but is that really it? Tunnels that lead to areas where monsters spawn? It seems so… pedestrian. In comparison I kind of got the feeling that the secret training area was preparing me for something. Like I needed a certain set of skills to pass it. I guess I’ll be prepared if my daughter is ever kidnapped.

The group was shrouded in silence during dinner, each person lost in their own thoughts, likely thinking on the question Simon posed earlier. After asking Kyle for some common traps and things that interrupted him during fights, Simon then asked the group to think on them and devise countermeasure that fit into their strategy.

During the meal Kyle felt stifled. It had been a long since he felt this much social pressure, even if it wasn’t directed at him. Being around a group of people lost in their own thoughts was harder than he remembered.

The general introspective mood continued after dinner until people began to turn in for the night. Kyle offered to take the first watch and soon he found himself alone, sitting next to the firecrystal that made up their campfire. It wasn’t long after everyone left that Sarah emerged from her tent to join him around the firecrystal campfire.

Usually when the two of them were up at night they sat in silence. But Kyle found his expectations broken as Sarah spoke.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said. In particular the way you said it. That wasn’t the worst of it, was it?”

Kyle shifted in his seat. Sarah’s question could have been very pointed, accusing him of leaving things out. Instead it felt… comforting. Like she understood why he was holding back. Kyle felt compelled to answer honestly.

“No, it wasn’t,” Kyle replied softly. “The things I had to endure… I’m glad I found the dowsing skill when I did. I don’t know if I could have made it if I didn’t know everyone was alive.”

Sarah reached out to squeeze his hand.

“You know I’m here, right? You did make it out and we are all alive. You can relax. You’re safe.”

Safe. What a foreign word, Kyle thought. Did I ever feel safe in the secret training area? How could I have? One slip. All it would have taken was one slip. One step closer to that edge, the jaw closing a second earlier, my skills just not being enough. It wouldn’t matter how careful I was if it was only 99% of the time. That 1% would have been the end.

“But now what?” Kyle hadn’t quite meant to speak out loud, but, almost unbidden, the words kept coming.

“Now what? I made it out. Whoopee. I did it. But what’s next? I spent two years in that goddamned hellhole. Two whole fucking years. More than two years. And now I’m out. And what, I’m just supposed to pretend it never happened, that I don’t jump at shadows? That I can ever walk across a floor without checking for pitfall traps? I feel like I don’t even know how to talk to people anymore. What am I supposed to say? That they are talking too loudly? That it might attract monsters? Wow, what a conversation starter. Hi, my name’s Kyle, and based on how loudly you talk you would be dead to a swarm of miasmic bats ten minutes ago.”

He wasn’t sure when it started, but Kyle felt tears rolling down his cheeks. Yeah, he made it out, but what did he get except a hefty dose of paranoia and the skills and the outlook of a fugitive? He would be great in an apocalypse, but the apocalypse already happened. Life moved on. People moved on. And now Kyle was regurgitated from the crazy delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic into the calm, boring reality that Humanity had carved for themselves inside the dungeon.

“When we were walking through the marketplace I had to stop myself from breaking my thin veneer or normalcy and doing something every time someone activated a skill. I felt naked without a shield on, bare before any potential danger. Every little shift of mana felt like a loaded bullet, aimed right at my exposed back. What do I do now? Where do I go? I thought there was a point to all this, that I would be prepared, prepared to face whatever came my way. But now…”

It was all too much. The dungeon might have prepared him to deal with monsters and traps, but not social situations. It hurt, physically hurt seeing how Sarah interacted with everyone else. She was different, no longer the same person who had to put of a boisterous front for others but cried into his chest at night. Kyle spent two years stranded in time, fighting for his life, while everyone else had grown up and moved on. The dungeon was their home now, while Kyle could only see its dangers, see the sharp blades it kept hidden away, waiting to strike.

Sarah guided Kyle over onto her lap, hugging him tightly while he cried.

“It’s alright, you aren’t alone now. Two years may seem like a long time now, but I will be here with you for the next two years, and the two years after that, and the two years after that, until this past two years is like a memory, overwritten and forgotten. I’ll make sure you aren’t alone ever again. And if we are ever separated, you will always know that I will be looking, searching, waiting until we are together again and the time of separation passes like a bad dream.”

Sarah gently brought her face next to Kyle’s and gave his tear-stained lips a long, slow kiss.

“Whatever you need, whatever it takes for you to feel safe again, I’m here for you. You can take as long as you need to figure this all out. Just remember you don’t have to do it alone anymore. You might be able to use a skill to slay real demons, but not even mental skills can easily slay demons of the mind. Only love can do that. Love, peace, and human connection. And if you ever find yourself running low on love, find yourself caged in, trapped by those demons of the mind, know that you can always draw on my love, that I will always be here, supporting you and helping you overcome those challenges, those demons, whatever they may be.”

Kyle eventually cried himself to sleep in Sarah’s arms. The sleep wasn’t peaceful. Even being held by Sarah couldn’t stop those fears, those monsters of the mind. He was finally able to admit that. But admitting that was an important step, and, just like it took time to level up skills and slay real demons, maybe it was okay for him to take time to slay his mental demons.

He had all the time in the world now, after all. Time to spend readjusting to life with Humanity, time to spend with his family, and, most importantly, time to spend with Sarah.